♪ Bob and Brad ♪
♪ The two most famous physical therapists ♪
♪ On the internet ♪
- Hi folks, I'm Bob Schrupp, physical therapist.
- Brad Heineck, physical therapist.
- And we are the most famous physical therapists
on the internet.
- In our opinion, of course Bob.
- I left this from the last video, the water.
- Still thirsty, eh?
- All right, today we're gonna talk about
massage gun heads.
Heal muscleS faster by using the correct head.
So this is kind of a tutorial today.
- Sure, well, we know these guns are becoming
more and more popular.
Everyone's making them, things are very useful.
We like them, but there are some things,
as you can see here, a lot of guns,
this one comes with five different attachments,
or head attachments that actually
come in contact with your skin.
And there are different heads for different reasons.
- And we'll give our opinion because
we're not the end all be all here.
We just have our opinion on what heads work well for what.
- Yeah, but we've used them a lot on ourselves
as well as patients and I think our opinion is--
- Worthwhile. - worthy, yes.
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- That's right.
- First off, I wanna say Brad, just real quickly,
my nephew just bought a massage gun,
he spent 40 bucks.
Junk.
Like, I should've talked to you first.
He goes, it's just junk, it was just terrible.
I mean, they used to be $400.
- Yeah, and that would be a good one.
- And that was a good one.
And now they've come down significantly,
and it's to the point where we actually have our own, too.
- Right, we think, and it is a good price
'cause it's a good gun.
And we even put our name on it, Bob and Brad.
But it is, yeah, the price has come down.
You can still get a good massage gun,
but probably not for $40.
- Not for 40 bucks, no.
All right, let's go to work, Brad.
- All right, so there's three variables
that help decide which head to use.
Number one is are you using it on what size muscle mass?
For example, if you're doing your hamstrings
versus your elbow, you're gonna use two different heads.
Also, the proximity of the massage to a bone.
Even if I joined your quadricep,
which is a big muscle mass
and you get close to your patella where the tendon is,
or your kneecap, that might change your choice
on which head to use.
Even though you got a big muscle mass here,
you're not gonna use this pointy one
when you get close to the bone unless you're very careful.
- Let me say this about muscle mass too, Brad,
that my nephew is a large guy, I mean bulky.
So even when he does his bicep or something like that,
it's not like doing my bicep which is hardly any,
you know, I'm hitting bone here.
- Right, exactly.
- He needs a different head probably for his body
than I would use.
- So vary from person to person on these.
And then the severity of the injury.
If you just injured a muscle
and you had a muscle strain or minor tear,
you're not gonna get real aggressive on it
the first day or two; you've gotta let it settle down.
- Often what we suggest is like let's say
you tore your muscle here,
we'd have you maybe massage here and here around it
soon after and eventually work your way into
the injury itself.
- Exactly, and then the tolerance of the user.
For example, like if your nephew is using it,
he's probably gonna tolerate a lot more
than if my grandmother, well my grandmother's passed,
but you know, than an elderly person.
- A slight person or a thin person.
- Yep, a thinner person.
So take that in mind too.
So there's no black and white answers to these,
so we're gonna give you some examples.
So we'll go through the heads first here, Bob.
Here we've got, and these are common,
each manufacturer may have some--
- [Bob] There are variations.
- [Brad] Yep, but they're pretty close.
We have a round one, and this is kinda soft,
but it's not like a hard plastic,
there's some give to it.
This one, which Bob and I probably think is our favorite,
it's an air cushion and it's spread out,
and air filled--
- [Bob] Very nice, very universal.
- Now, this one is hard plastic,
and it's a flat surface as you can see about that size.
I do use this one, not all the time, we'll get into that.
Now, this one is a hard plastic and it comes
not to a point, but more to a point,
that's gonna get into deep to some large muscles.
- [Bob] Or let's say you have some scar tissue,
you wanna get in there.
- And you wanna really get in.
And this one we call the field goal.
This one, neither Bob and I have really used.
I thought about using it once.
We'll maybe talk about it a little bit.
- I mean, we thought about it that you could
go along the spine on each side of the spine.
- Right, you don't wanna hit the bone,
the spinous process, but you're gonna have to have
two person, a second person is gonna have to do that
and do it very carefully.
- Yeah, because otherwise you still could
bump up against the spine.
- Right, so anyways, I'm sure when it was made,
it had a specific use; we haven't come up to it yet.
To be honest with you, these other ones I've had,
they've covered everything very well.
Okay, let's go to the neck.
This is, to me, it's a red flag.
You wanna turn around once, Bob?
Yeah, bring the camera up.
If you're going like the low neck maybe,
actually where the shirt line is.
- [Bob] Well, if you're going from the upper trapezius.
- Right, I'm gonna use this borderline.
At the black or down you could use a massage gun.
If you're going up here, do not use a massage gun.
They're too aggressive, you could actually get in
and sublox the vertebrae possibly.
- I don't know.
- It's very uncomfortable.
- It's like a jackhammer.
And the same thing on your head, Brad.
You really can't go up into your head.
- Anything on the neck or higher,
you're not gonna use it.
Not a gun, maybe one of the other ones
that are very light, it's a different story.
So number two, let's go over to the wrist and the elbow.
For a lot of people, they don't have a lot of muscle
mass there.
If you have tennis elbow, oftentimes the point
that you need to get after is close to the bone.
So in that situation, the round ball
might be a good option.
We're gonna put that in there, turn this on,
there's a three second delay there.
- [Bob] Yeah, I wanna make sure people are aware of that
because the first time I tried to turn this on,
I'm like, it doesn't work.
- It's not an on/off switch.
- No, you gotta push-- - on and hold it, yep.
On this gun, it's very common with other guns too,
this one has five different levels of intensity.
It just turned off, now I gotta push hold
it for one thousand one, one thousand two.
Oops, you have to leave it off for a certain amount of time,
there we go.
All right, I'm gonna go at level four.
Now, if I go straight in like this,
if I went up here and it was pretty sore
close to the bone, I might wanna go down here
and I can work here.
Now, the neat thing about this round head
is you can change the intensity by the angle.
I can go crosswise, and you still can get
a cross friction massage,
which you can do with your hands manually.
And then the more you go in like this,
the deeper it gets.
Now, this is probably too aggressive for me;
I'm gonna go back to here and actually
I'm thinking I'm going to actually go to--
- [Bob] I think the air filled.
- Yep, the air filled.
Bob and I are on a right train of thought there,
and let's get this going now.
- [Bob] There we go.
- [Brad] There, that feels much better.
- [Bob] And the thing about this with the air filled,
like let's say you mistakenly hit the bone,
it can tolerate that.
- Yeah, I'm right over the bone right now,
and it does not hurt.
If you had tennis elbow, it would probably hurt,
you wouldn't do this.
- It'd be too much. - Exactly, exactly.
- So yeah, whenever you're flirting around those bones,
especially if it's a smaller area like this,
you're gonna probably, the air filled I think.
But the ball does serve a nice purpose of
intense, less intense.
- Yep, you know, when in doubt,
I would start with the air filled.
That's always the go-to one for me,
and then if I'm not happy with it,
then I go onto something else.
- You see these heads just pop in and pop out by the way.
- Yep, it's just the resistance interference fit.
Let's go to the five.
You know, the quadriceps or the hamstrings,
most people much more muscle mass.
Right now I've got a hamstring issue,
I'm actually almost recovered from it,
but I've been using the flat one that's hard.
I was considering going to the more aggressive one
with the point to get into that muscle,
but I found this was working well,
so I didn't wanna get more aggressive.
- I would've guessed that.
- Yeah, I was thinking about it.
Now, you wanna move, Bob, I just wanna show you how,
what I find with these is I like to do it
over a little clothing when you have the smooth hard ones
because it slides so well.
Let's get this thing fired up again.
I'll go up to level four on this.
- [Bob] Now, are you gonna be able to see this
against his dark pants?
- Can you see that, Liz?
I do it on my hamstring but because of the color,
the black on black, I'll just do it down here,
and it just slides over the material,
that really makes a difference as far as
the ease of doing this.
- [Bob] Oh, I can see that.
- Oh, it feels great, Bob, and I don't have any problem
in this area, but I'm telling you I'd do this for a while
just to enjoy it.
- [Bob] So I guess the pointer,
that would probably slide over.
- Oh yeah, 'cause that is the hard plastic as well.
But you know, that one, we can,
so if we do go to this one.
You know, I don't have a pair of white pants
for modeling here.
- You can just pull up, do it on your calf.
- Oh, sure, yep, good idea.
And I have done this on my calf.
- [Bob] I had tore part of my calf muscle last winter,
and I spent a lot of time with a massage gun.
I mean, I would do it before I worked out,
and I would also do it later in the day.
- That's a good point, Bob.
Actually, I do the massage gun on my hamstrings
and then I stretch and then I run.
Now, this is a good point right here.
I'm going here and I get into this part.
I don't know if I've got an injury there,
or if it's just sensitive, but that is painful.
I'm not gonna go there too deep.
Over here, I can push in deep
and I can get into that muscle really good
with this pointy one and down in here.
And you can work angles with this.
You'll find out after you work with this for a while,
what you can do and how to work it.
- I would like to say really there's no wrong answer
to these things.
You know, you're gonna experiment and find out
which one works for you.
- Exactly, exactly.
- My nephew that's gonna be getting one of these guns,
he's a big guy, like I said,
and he wants to use it prior to softball,
he's a big softball player.
And he wants to get his muscles loose before he does that.
Let me take, can I have that round one?
So I had quadricep tendinitis.
- Oh yes, I remember this.
This was early on when we first started using guns.
- Yeah, and what's interesting about this,
it was not getting better.
I was doing everything, I was doing eccentric strengthening,
all the things they tell you to do,
and I've started doing the massage,
and what's interesting, it didn't start getting better,
it didn't start getting better until I started
working right onto the bone a little bit.
- So right where that tendon connects.
- You're right, it works better on the side with that.
- Yeah, when you get to the bone.
- Yeah, so I actually went over the bone
and it seemed like that's where the injury was,
the damage.
- The scar tissue was there and we needed
to break that up finally.
- And it got better rapidly 90% better.
And then over time, it got 100% better.
- And we've had that experience with other people,
patients, or people commenting cross friction or this,
it's like, it just got better real quickly.
- Yeah it did, it's amazing.
Once you break that scar tissue up.
You know, these can be used, like we said,
before and after if you have an injury
to warm it up.
- Well, one more tool in the bucket, isn't it?
- Yeah, one last thing I was gonna say,
when we first were a little reluctant to use
mechanical devices when we were seeing people.
We used to all do it by hand,
and what we found is a lot of people prefer these.
And a lot of people end up getting them themselves then.
- And us as therapists, your fingers don't get sore.
You know, a few minutes working aggressively
can really take your toll.
Especially as you get a little older, Bob.
Not that we are, but if you were an older therapist.
- We're elders.
That means we're wise.
- Take care, enjoy.